'Gary Miller & Ralf Weihrauch' was a 2005 collaboration between German accordionist Ralf Weihrauch and myself. Performing as an acoustic duo, we released an album, 'Stand Fast, Stand Steady', and completed a single tour of Europe in support of the album's release.
It has to be said that this collaboration occurred during a particularly difficult and turbulent time in my life. Both my marriage and The Whisky Priests had recently ended, I had lost all sense of self-worth, my self-confidence was shot to pieces, and I had spiralled into a deep suicidal alcoholic depression. As a result, I had become socially withdrawn and my weight had plumetted to 7.5 stones (less than 50kg).
Then, out of the blue, Ralf contacted me and suggested we collaborate together on recording an album.
At first I was reluctant; it seemed like the last thing I would want to be doing at that time in my life. I was in a bad place and I needed to pull myself out of it.
I compiled a demo CD of about a dozen new songs I had recently written, and sent it to Ralf for his consideration. This was at a time when this kind of thing was done by snail mail. So, having sent the package, I had to wait a few days for his response. This rough demo included several songs I was particularly pleased with such as 'Albatross and Endurance' and 'Euphonium and Cornet' (the latter of which eventually resurfaced years later as part of the 'From Coalfield to Battlefield' project), along with other long-lost songs such as 'God's Country', 'When Atlas Rests'
When I finally saw a copy of the finished CD, I was even more disappointed by the packaging. Their was an inferior quality to it but the worst part was the front cover. I had specified to Ralf that I in no way wanted any mention of The Whisky Priests to appear throughout the packaging at all, yet there it was all big and bold on the front cover, bracketed beneath my name (minus the definitive article). Furthermore, my proposal for the title was 'Fast and Steady', as a play on one of the track titles 'Stand Fast, Stand Steady', which I thought was not only snappy and direct but also quite fun and tongue-in-cheek but the title as it now appeared on both the cover and disc read 'Stand Fast, Stand Steady', exactly the same as the song title, which I thought was bloody awful as an album title, plus I've never been a fan of naming an album directly after one of its tracks anyway as I've always felt it draws undue attention to that one track, as the "title track", and in my opinion gives the impression that you couldn't think of anything else to call the album. To top it all off, the front cover text was messy and all over the place and the font was shite as well.
Regarding the songs themselves, although, in my own subjective opinion, the rest of the album is at best inconsequential and at worst completely throwaway, there is arguably one half-decent song, 'Bookend', lurking amongst the chaff, buried away as the closing track on the album. When written, 'Bookend' had originally been intended to be the closing track on what would have been the next (and, at the time, probably final) Whisky Priests album, if the band had continued. The song was basically meant to serve as a "bookend" to the Whisky Priests career but its eventual fate ended up being sadly somewhat less significant...
Of the other original non-Whisky Priests songs on the album, the "title-track" 'Stand Fast, Stand Steady' was one of a series of six songs I had written a couple of years earlier for a commission by Hexham Council to commemorate the Hexham Riot of 1761, with a performance in Hexham Market Place on the anniversary date of 9th March 2003. Other than that, the remaining five Hexham Riot songs have never seen the light of day and, considering my current huge backlogue of unreleased material, would now seem destined for obscurity. For anyone interested, the titles of those five songs are 'It's a Lottery', 'Insurrection', 'The Horrific Execution of Peter Patterson', 'Bloody Monday', and 'Redcoat's Blues' - there were all fairly dark and miserable but with some morbid black humour thrown in for good measure!
Anyway, 'Stand Fast, Stand Steady' wasn't on the original demo CD I sent to Ralf. It was just something I threw into the hat as an a-capella piece during our reherasal sessions in Ralf's kitchen, when he suddenly asked if I had anything else available - he seemed to like it because it gave him the chance to showcase himself on bodhran and tin whistle, and so it was added to the track listing for the album at the eleventh hour (the other five songs wouldn't have offered the same kind of showcasing opportunity to Ralf, so they never got a look in!)...
The following is from the press release for the album and tour : -
"From Durham to Dorsten" - England meets Germany to create a unique acoustic duo. Songwriter of folk punk pioneers The Whisky Priests teams up with German Ralf Weihrauch to perform a selection of new songs, some updated acoustic versions of "old hits" specially selected from The Whisky Priests' early catalogue, and a few North East of England traditional songs and tunes.
I ended up with a couple of boxes of CDs of the album, the rest remained in Ralf's possession.
Ralf subsequently came back into my life, when he took part in The Whisky Priests Reunion Tour of 2018 - but that's another story!